


the pink gone gold

by punybastard



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Kissing, Power Imbalance, Sibling Incest, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:00:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26377681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/punybastard/pseuds/punybastard
Summary: Corona and Ianthe meet up on a moonlet somewhere. It goes, on the balance, rather poorly.
Relationships: Ianthe Tridentarius/Coronabeth Tridentarius
Comments: 9
Kudos: 47





	the pink gone gold

**Author's Note:**

> yes this is all very toxic and bad and i am bad for making it. but i couldn't stop thinking about "babs??? who cares about babs????? she could've taken ME" and how sickening it was and it made me do this and i will not apologize. takes place mid-Harrow the Ninth.

You doesn't know how you know, you just _know_ , even before the stumpy extended feet of the shuttle touch ground, even before the docking bay opens, even before the blue fire of landing thrusters fades, that Ianthe is inside. A joy blooms in your ribcage so bright it's painful and you take off towards it at a dead run. You have to take a soaring leap to clear the gap between the still-extending ramp and the ground, and are bounding up it when the steel slides open to reveal a pale fragile figure. You never paid attention in creche but now, a star careening towards another, you understand gravity, and inexorability. You hit Ianthe full force and your sister – your sister! In the flesh! – staggers at the weight. 

"Ianthe," you say, and it comes out all blubbery, a sob of delight. 

"Hi, sweetheart." She sounds so casual. But she wraps her long arms around you and you bury your faces in each other's hair, necks, and breathe, and you are so happy you could burst. 

"I'm so happy I could burst," you tell her. 

Ianthe takes hold of your head with her long fingers and pulls back to look at your face. "You twit," she murmurs, "you dithering fool. I missed you." 

"I missed you too," you say, grinning widely. Ianthe doesn't seem like a Hand of the Emperor arisen – she seems like the sister you've always known. Breakable, haughty. Her long lovely face is the same; she still runs cold, she still smells like the musty-sweet fragrance she's been wearing for years. Only her eyes are new, a muddle of herself and Babs, a sort of ugly mosaic of blues and hazels laid in lavender grout. 

She beholds you right back. You wonder how you must look to her – your hair snarled, dirt and ship-grime on your trousers and boots, stripped of jewelry except for a few earrings and armbands. It's the longest you've ever gone in the same clothes. You thought it all a rather dashing and roguish turn of events at first, but now you're hankering for a bath in real, hot water, and for your closet of silks and linens, and for a week or two of lounging. Real lounging, having meals summoned up to your rooms and getting crumbs all in the bedspread and playing lazy endless card games with Ianthe and Babs. Well. With Ianthe, you suppose. Since the glamour of gallivanting around with rebels wears off you've been entertaining yourself with nostalgia for the Third House. As exciting as working against the Emperor is – you're a turncoat now! How _dastardly_ – you're relieved that the whole episode is over, that you are reunited, whole. You've never been apart for longer than a week before – at most a few days in the sick bay when you were kids. For a little bit you felt strangely free. But then each consecutive day without Ianthe felt longer and you got more fidgety and fed up without her at your back, more empty and adrift, and a long endless ache coalesced in your chest and wouldn't ever budge. 

That's all over. You drag her down the ramp, down to collapse in a shady patch of the mosslike soft stuff that grows on the ground. 

"Oh, darling, your arm," you gasp, catching hold of it. She allows it. The gleaming bones are responsive to your touch, fingers curling in a very lifelike manner. You intertwine your hand with her skeletal one and hold the join up to admire it, the way her metallic joints look between your fleshed knuckles. "It's gorgeous. What happened?" 

"Thank you, sweeting," she smiles. "You've missed rather a lot. I lost it back in Caanan House, and had some technical difficulties with the reattachment. That little guano gobbet from the Ninth fixed me up, and I'll admit she did a good job of it." 

"She's with you? She's a Lyctor?" You grin. "Are you bosom buddies? What's the emperor like?" You lower your voice rakishly despite being the only two people on the entire planet. "Is he more or less handsome than the portraits?" 

She laughs her tinkling and breakable laugh. "Too many questions. It's all quite underwhelming, really. Harrowhark is a bit of an abort, and God likes her best but that's his loss. I think she may have a crush on me, the poor thing. The Lyctors have some juicy drama happening but they're also _so_ crotchety and insufferable." She heaves a limp sigh. "Never meet your heroes. How's your rebel nonsense? Are they keeping you fed and watered?" 

"Oh," you wave a hand, "they're fine. Very angry people. Absolutely terrible food, and you know I'll eat just anything." 

"It can't be half as bad as the meal Harrowhark cooked for us," she says. You are bubbling over with joy at the simple pleasure of seeing her sprawled on the ground, just like she did on picnics back on the Third House, when you'd escape to gossip and sip wine. "Lord, but do I have a dinner party story for you someday." 

"Tell me now," you say. "Tell me everything!" 

She shakes her head slightly. "I haven't the time, Corona. I could only slip away for a bit. I just needed proof in the flesh that you're alive, and that Edenites hadn't somehow chiseled through that thick dome to brainwash you." 

You frown. This wasn't the plan. "But surely I'm going back with you." 

"Oh, no," she says, "no, you can't." Her words lance the fat bubble of happiness in your chest like a boil. 

Your heart stutters at the look on her face. "You can't leave me here. You need to take me with you." 

"Baby, I'm just about out of time already. And I mean it when I say you can't." She stirs like she's going to stand but you catch the front of her pearlescent robes, yank her down and yourself up so you're both in arrested, uncomfortable kneeling positions. 

Hot, helpless tears slip out and slide down your cheeks. "Yes I can. Why not?" You want to stamp your feet. This was supposed to be your reunion. This was supposed to be happy. 

"Because, baby, it's just not the place for you." God, she sounds so careless and bored that you want to shake her. "Plus the Mithraeum's dreadful, really. Not a speck of fun in the place. You'd be bored to bits." 

"I don't care," you say quickly. "I'll stay out of the way. I can be bored. I'll take up crochet. I'll do your washing. I'll train till I'm better than Babs ever was." You put every ounce of queenly authority you can muster into your voice. "Bring me back with you."

The thing about the Princess of Ida flex is that it has never once worked on the other Princess of Ida. You catch the tiny flash in her eyes as she turns her attention to the nails of her fleshed hand, examining the cuticles, and you know you've tried her patience. 

"Look, Corona. I'm a Hand. I hang out with God. It's a bit of an exclusive club, the universe's seat of necromantic power. See," she looks right at you, "not only are you mortal, you're not even a necromancer. Sweetheart – you're nothing if I take you with me. You'd be in danger, and moreover, you'd be dead weight." 

Her voice is so gentle. She puts her long cold palm on your wet cheek and you turn into it, instinctively, hating her for it.

"I'm not," you say thickly. "I'm not dead weight. I need you." 

"Oh, baby," she says. Those sick-sweet violet eyes bore into you, taking hold of your heart. "I need you too. Just not right now." 

Misery crests its dam inside and floods you entirely. You make a hot, animal sound of pain, and pull her close, and kiss her full on the mouth. 

She goes rigid with surprise – and then loosens, thin lips opening under yours, her bone hand gripping at the tangled hair of your nape. You kiss your sister like breathing sweet cold air, desperately, beseechingly. You take hold of her pale, awful head and kiss her for far too long, like a starving woman. And she lets you. 

You pull back heaving and confused. Ianthe looks nonplussed, which is a rare and alien expression on her. 

"Corona," she says, infinitely soft. "Oh, Corona." 

" _Take me with you,_ " you say, because you just have to keep asking, and she'll indulge you. She has to. 

It's working. She smiles, a small one that would put a sweet dimple on one cheek if she had any fat to dimple. She's going to bring you back with her. You smile back unsteadily but triumphantly. Ianthe lays her human hand on the crown of your head and stands up. 

You try to get up too, but you're so overwhelmed with emotion your legs are weak. You take a deep, stuttering breath, and try again. Again your legs don't budge. Faint alarm bells start to ring in the back of your mind. You grab at your thigh and feel, paralytically, nothing at all. Your legs are frozen and unresponsive from the waist down. You're stuck kneeling on the soft moss. 

You turn your face up to Ianthe, who's stood above you. Her face is full up with pity, mocking and sincere at the same time the way it only ever is for you. 

She takes her hand from the top of your head. You reach out to grab at her but she steps smoothly back out of range. The loss of proximity physically hurts.

"Ianthe." Your breaths are coming ragged. "Ianthe, no." You bend at the waist and scrape at the ground, at your own legs, trying to tug them out of position with sheer force of will. 

"This hurts me just as much as it does you." 

You give up on ever moving yourself and keen, a wild animal in a steel-jawed trap. 

"Hm. Maybe not quite as much." She looks critically over you. "Corona, listen to me." 

"I hate you," you sob. "I hate you. I've always hated you." You know how pathetic you're being and you don't care, you don't. 

"I said listen to me. This is for your own good. Don't think for a second I'm not coming back to get you from those awful rebel losers. It's all so tacky, really, I hate to leave you with them a second longer in fear it rubs off. But this is what I have to do, and you are going to have to understand. I need you to trust me." 

You look mutinously at the ground, like a child. 

"Look at me." 

You close your eyes. 

She steps in and the hard bones of her gold hand seize your jaw. You do look now, unwillingly. She is so close and speaks so gently. 

"Everything I do, I do for you. Everything. Do you trust me?" 

Mute, you nod. You are unable to do anything else. You were never able to do anything else. 

"Good," she says, satisfied, like she's settled some minor nettling matter. "Then I'll see you soon. I love you, dearest." 

_How soon,_ you should be demanding, _how long this time, how many months, how many minutes, do you know what it's like to be without you, how LONG???_ But your throat is tight and you choke out – "I love you." 

She's already turning and stepping lightly up into the shuttle, which swallows her up with a clean series of pneumatic hisses and clicks. Your arms hang uselessly at your sides as the thrusters power on and your sister rises into the thick peach-colored atmosphere and vanishes in a matter of seconds. It's like watching Dominicus go out, except much worse. 

It's another minute before feeling rushes back into your legs. The second it does you throw yourself forward into the spot where the shuttle was because it's as close as you can humanly get to her. You lay on the warm burnt rings of vegetation and bawl. Your whole body shudders with the absence of your twin: the pain feels like a scar healed badly over and then scraped right back off, over and over again, forever.

Some minutes or hours later it subsides. You sit up. It's brighter out now, the sky a warm rosy pink. You fish the cracked comm tablet out of your pocket and see that you have a little time left before the BOE shuttle lands to pick you up. 

You are Coronabeth Tridentarius, Crown Princess of Ida. You take a deep, steadying breath. It will only be a little while longer. Ianthe is coming back for you, and you lay this certainty down into an unshakeable bedrock of hope. You collect yourself around this, your central star, the knowledge that she loves you.


End file.
